Improving Scholarly Activity Through a Bundled Intervention of Resident-Faculty Connection and Research Ideas

Residents report barriers to engaging in scholarly activity despite this being a common requirement across residency programs. Two commonly reported barriers are a lack of mentorship by faculty and a lack of ideas for projects that meet the criteria for scholarly activity. The study objective is to describe the effect of an intervention to address a lack of mentorship and a lack of ideas for scholarly activities.

A retrospective cohort design was utilized to investigate changes in scholarly activity between 2 academic years. An internal medicine residency program with 30 residents and 17 faculty members participated in an educational innovation in the 2022/2023 academic year. Residents in the previous academic year (n = 30) served as the comparison group. The faculty brainstormed ideas for new projects and provided sign-up sheets with quick response (QR) codes. First-year residents had to either sign up for a project or have their own protocol developed within 3 months of beginning residency.

The intervention group participated in more original research projects, presentations, and publications in PubMed indexed journals than the comparison group. The most notable increase was in presentations at regional and national conferences, which rose from 3 to 7. Participation in projects across other post-graduate year groups also increased.

Faculty members brainstorming ideas, providing a hard deadline for first year residents, and the use of a QR code to recruit residents to existing research teams provided a cheap, easily implemented scholarly activity intervention. Other programs may benefit from adopting a similar program if possible.